Ah, but the word "comedy" is in my title, so I should return to my stories of book cover development. Onward...
The most difficult story for me to create an ebook cover for was "A Singularly Unsuitable Word." The interesting thing about this story is that there is already an illustration in existence for it, which is unusual for a short story. It originally appeared in an anthology called A Kudzu Christmas: Twelve Mysterious Tales
But I'm not Daniel Wallace. What was I going to do with a Prohibition-era story about a little girl cornered in a Florida swamp by rumrunners, watching her sister be kidnapped?
Well, there was a Model T involved in the story. And I could hardly ignore the little girl, Lila. So I combed the internet for public domain photos of swamps and old cars and little girls from a bygone time. It doesn't have the graphic impact of my covers for "Starch" and "Wounded Earth" and "Mouse House" and "Offerings." (See the archives for the past week for those stories.) But a bold graphic statement would not speak of the 1920s. So this is what I did. If you have observations, for good or ill, let me know. But I do like the photo of the little girl. She is a very good stand-in for my little Lila, who is one of my children, just as much as any of my other characters, even though she's old enough to be my grandmother.
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